More than any other artist of his time, Richard Jackson has focused his atten­tion on the radical expan­sion of painting. The Amer­ican artist pushes the formal bound­aries of the picturesque and creates situ­a­tions, which link the appli­ca­tion of the paint through the use of machines to its proces­sual aspect. For the first time, the SCHIRN is assem­bling five of his alto­gether twelve char­ac­ter­istic Rooms―room instal­la­tions based on the prin­ciple of auto­mated painting. Some of them are walk-in instal­la­tions, while others can be viewed only through windows or peep­holes.

Jackson combines crit­ical commen­taries on painting with social contexts, pairing them with provoca­tive wit and ambi­gu­i­ties, as well as refer­ences to iconic works by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschen­berg. Inside the rooms, comic-like figures, animals, or objects become the protag­o­nists in a unique process―air compres­sors and pumps cause rich colors to flow through tubes and funnels, through ears, mouths, and other body orifices and spread them across the floor, walls, furnish­ings, and the protag­o­nists them­selves. The thematic rooms docu­ment a painting process which is detached from the artist and expands into the spatial. Visi­tors become the inves­ti­ga­tors of the previous spec­tac­ular painting act and voyeurs of bizarre scenarios.